Nick Reding - Methland

Loya noted that the DTOs will never abandon the meth business—no matter how good the cocaine market—since, with meth, the DTOs control manufacture, distribution, and retail. Meth is a peach of a business. It’s also possibly, as Patricia Case once noted, “the most American drug.” Coupled with the American mania for work, it’s as though meth’s ever-reassorting genome is a part of our own. As Loya’s friend Bill Ruzzamenti, another former DEA special agent in charge, once said to me, “Meth truly will never go away. It can’t. It’s too big a piece of what we are .”

While Loya waits to see what the DTOs will do next, he continues to privately negotiate with pharmaceutical companies and the retail chains that sell their wares, in order, as he put it, “to make them see what’s at stake.” The hope is that if NARCS will take the pressure off state legislatures, they might amend their meth laws to look more like what Loya and DEA had in mind all along.

“You know,” said Loya, “I’m sympathetic to big business. I’m not trying to make things hard for them. I just say to CVS via the lobbyists, ‘Look, your clerks are in cahoots with crooks. We’re going to take them down, and you’ll look bad. Do you really want your company to look like a criminal organization?’” Loya paused. “I say that, and I try to stay calm while freaking houses are blowing up in Jefferson County. But I can’t stay calm anymore. So then I just yell.”

A few days before we spoke, Loya told me, he’d had a meeting with the vice president of NARCS. Loya listened while the man reiterated that clerks and pharmacists in the employ of CVS and Rite-Aid aren’t police officers. They should not, said the NARCS vice president, be expected to tell customers that they can’t buy cold medicine. If someone was shoplifting, the man wanted to know, would the clerk apprehend, cuff, and jail the shoplifter? No—he’d call the police, as he should. And anyway, he went on, the pharmacies aren’t legally obligated to do anything more than what they’re doing. Drugs and drug manufacturers are police business, not theirs. The Combat Meth Act makes that very clear, he told Loya.

“After all these years, and all these meetings, and all these conferences,” said Loya, “I started to do something that I’ve never, ever done: I started to get up and walk out. Midsentence. It was like I just…” Here Loya paused. His first street buy, as a twenty-year-old agent with the California BNE, in San Francisco in 1968, was meth. He’s been contending with it ever since. “It was like,” he went on, “something finally broke.”

But Loya didn’t get up to leave. He remained seated. Then he stopped listening. He let the vice president talk, and he tried not to hear a word of what he said, instead summoning all the patience he could muster from the deepest reaches of his soul. Finally, said Loya, the man’s mouth stopped moving. That’s when Loya started to explain, one more time.

In April 2008, Nathan Lein was elected to the Oelwein city council. He won, said Clay Hallberg, in a landslide. The Ninth Ward, where Nathan lives in a small white house across the street from a former meth lab, is no longer just his home—it’s now his charge, too. In May, Major graduated from community college in In dependence with a degree in machinery repair. Bob, the leader of the Sons of Silence, was arrested along with his daughter—Major’s ex-girlfriend, and the mother of his son, Buck—for manufacture of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute. Bob and his daughter await sentencing. Buck’s half sister, Caroline, is in foster care. Buck begins kindergarten in the fall.

Lori Arnold was released from the medium-security federal work camp for women in Greenville, Illinois, on June 3, 2008. She moved to Chandler, Arizona, to live near one of her brothers. One week later, she took her first mandatory urine analysis, to test for illegal substances in her system. She failed, and was sentenced to five years’ probation.

The last time I called Roland Jarvis, in July 2008, he was sitting in the living room of his mother’s two-bedroom house. It had been more than three years since we had watched Goodfellas in that same room and Jarvis began unwinding the strands of his two-decade struggle with meth. I was glad to hear his voice, after my calls had gone unanswered for over twelve months. At one point, I had heard a rumor that he or his ex-wife had committed suicide.

“No,” he said, “no one’s committed suicide.”

Aside from that, it was strikes and gutters, as some people say in Oelwein: ups and downs, goods and bads. Jarvis’s middle son had finally received a new kidney and was doing well. Jarvis’s mother, though, would be headed back to jail soon, this time for driving drunk. His two daughters were doing well, too; one had graduated from Oelwein High that spring. He’d been fishing with them at the town lake just the other day.

“Same old, same old,” said Jarvis.

I asked him if he was clean.

“Not really,” he said. “But I’m still here.”

When we hung up, I thought about a trip I’d taken in the summer of 2005. I was still looking for a town to write about then. I’d been to Oelwein twice that summer, spending about a month there. I’d been driving a lot, too, dropping into towns I’d read about in newspapers, asking people to talk to me about meth. I spent a lot of time in emergency rooms, in courtrooms, and in county jails. One weekend, I drove five hundred miles from Kentucky to Iowa, then back again. The problem is that I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, exactly, or even what I was looking for. So like everyone else, I went to California.

I started out in San Diego, where I met Tony Loya. Then, for a week, I drove around the Central Valley, finally ending up in San Jose. Along the way, I tried to insinuate myself into every town with a motel vacancy. The Central Valley was just as Steinbeck had described it: hot, flat, and dusty, the cool, distant mountains a promise, or maybe just a mirage. It felt like Iowa in the summer, or the Dakotas, or even Missouri. I didn’t know what I was looking at when I saw how some of the canals in the most isolated parts of the valley ran red. Later, a DEA agent told me that, in addition to providing water for the most prolific farm country in the nation, the canals were dump sites for red phosphorus from meth superlabs hidden among the orange and pecan groves.

At the end of that trip, I took a late-afternoon flight from San Jose to JFK Airport, in New York. Three hours after takeoff, looking at a map in the back of an in-flight magazine, I reckoned us to be over eastern South Dakota, heading for Iowa. At that point, the plane would have been at the nadir of its arc, where it would remain for a short while before beginning the long, smooth descent. With the sun slanting low in our wake, the land was awash in the refracted warmth of the day’s dying light. In the glow, and from thirty-five thousand feet, it was impossible to see the little towns below.

At that height, too, we were caught in the temporal netherworld that is specific to late-afternoon and evening transcontinental flights. The curvature of the earth was clearly visible. Ahead, to the north and east, the air was blue and dark. Behind, to the south and west, the air glowed red. It was truly as though the night were pushing itself across the vast contours of the land, driving the day before it. Below us, though, in Sioux Falls and in Algona, the light, along with the notion of possibility, remained.

Fifteen minutes later, even the largest of the land’s features began to fade as the plane moved east. My mood soured. I didn’t want to go back to New York. Instead, I yearned to return to Missouri for the first time in years. We were too far north to see St. Louis, so I searched for the Mississippi among the tiny, sparse points of light visible against the opaque land. At least the river, I thought, might give me some fleeting connection to my home.